Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [112]
Calaphilus stood his ground. ‘Captain,’ he said, slowly.
‘Have your men execute these proditores. These... traitors’
Which they did, blindly, and with little fuss, much to the astonishment of Marcus and Fabius.
As they lay dead from their multiple stab wounds to the stomach, Calaphilus stepped from behind the murderous assault of his men and loomed over the pair of traitors.
‘Rank is still the most important thing to a soldier of Rome,’
he told the corpses. ‘Something that young pups like you never seem to understand’
He turned to his men. ‘This thing is done,’ he said, ending the matter once and for all.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Here’s Where The Story Ends
And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.
Mark 13:13
When Ian, Vicki and Barbara finally arrived back at the place where they believed that the TARDIS had crash-landed, they found nothing.
Ian stood scratching his head for a moment and looking rather stupidly around. ‘We must have got the wrong hill. Or something,’ he said.
‘I’m fairly positive it was this one,’ Barbara replied, comforting Vicki as best she could. ‘The Doctor wouldn’t have just gone off without us,’ she continued, firmly, seeing the question that Ian was just about to ask. ‘There must be another explanation.’
‘There is,’ said Ian, pointing into the distance. ‘Look...’
From out of the sand of the desert, a series of hazy and shimmering shapes appeared, walking towards the group.
‘There they are,’ Dorcas told the delighted Doctor as Ian, Barbara and Vicki came into view, waving from half a mile away.
‘Your friends are all safe?’ James asked, and the Doctor nodded wordlessly, out of breath from being rushed back to the Christians’ camp and then out to this distant location.
‘I am glad,’ Daniel told him, patting him on the back.
‘I also,’ continued James.
‘You can never know the gladness in my heart,’ the Doctor told them as they reached the top of a steep incline that led down into the gully where Ian, Barbara and Vicki waited.
* * *
The Doctor was apologetic to his friends, but there was little he could say. The TARDIS was gone.
James told them that he had learned from a source that the strange blue chariot found in this location over two weeks ago had been taken by the Roman senator Germanicus Vinicius and transported, apparently, to his villa near Rome.
‘Unless we want to spend the rest of their lives in this time,’ the Doctor noted, ‘then we must go in search of it.’
‘Walk to Rome?’ Ian asked incredulously. ‘But it’s miles!’
The understatement could have been amusing in different circumstances. But not today. ‘You have a better idea, hmm?’
snapped the Doctor.
Barbara, meanwhile, was pleased to see Dorcas and Tobias with the group of Christians who had accompanied the Doctor.
‘We wish you every success in that which you seek,’
Dorcas told her as the Doctor said his goodbyes to James and Daniel.
Barbara merely repeated what Ian had told Dorcas and Tobias some days earlier: that the Christians would be free one day.
‘If anyone else had stated such opinion as fact, I should have laughed in their face,’ Dorcas said with a wry smile. ‘But with you, I sense that what you say is preordained. It shall come to pass.’
They left their Christian friends and began the long walk to the desert road, and the next town on the Via Egnatia. ‘All roads lead to Rome, they say,’ the Doctor told his friends.
‘That is probably not true, but this one certainly does.’
After they had walked for several miles, and the waving figures of James, Daniel, Dorcas and Tobias were distant specks against the horizon, Ian felt compelled to ask the Doctor a question. ‘Do you think that we have left Byzantium a better or a worse place?’ He paused and tried to put into words a feeling that he had been unable to shake. ‘Is it just me, or didn’t we solve anything?’
‘Who knows?’ asked the Doctor at last, as they headed